Rugby and Romance: A Load of Balls?

When I read recently that Mills & Boon had commissioned a series of their lurid romantic pot boilers to be set amid the rucks and mauls of rugby football a little part of me finally died.

You see I used to play rugby; at least that is what my team mates and I called it. To some it was ‘rugger’ but that was a little snooty for the likes of us. No, we played rugby. For thirty years since I was eight years old I, and many like me, spent many an afternoon with my head stuffed under another man’s sweaty armpit whilst a huge, 18 stone giant would hang from the crotch of my shorts with his shoulder up my rectum. I was a front row forward and the game that I played and the men that I played with, far from exciting the amatory fantasies of a Mills & Boon reader were much more likely to have featured in her worst nightmare.

To learn that rugby players are now deemed to be an object of desire for the fluttering hearts of the nation’s more impressionable women is final proof that the game we loved all those years back is now gone forever. The modern version, with its new rules preventing boring in the scrum, allowing lifting in the line out and reducing the ruck and the maul to mere vestiges of their former selves calls only for light fast playmakers. Today even an amateur rugby team looks like a bunch of soccer posers in garish coloured jerseys. The onset of professionalism requires a much higher level of fitness and stamina and its practitioners have to be honed athletes who fill their skin tight tunics to perfection hence their emergence as subjects for erotic fiction. In our day the true ethos of rugby was its ability to involve everybody whatever their shape and size.

Huge lanky bean poles, a hazard to navigation anywhere else in life became line out experts. Stunted little men, warped by inferiority complexes, discovered that they made ideal scrum halves whilst deformed simians, shunned by society and told to go and find a bell rope to climb became hookers. Even I, seasoned player that I was, would sometimes shudder at the sheer repellent ugliness of some of my opponents. Beer guts, broken noses, cauliflowered ears and scars a German Junkers would have been proud of were essential features, campaign medals of a lifetime of sticking their heads into the maelstrom of fists, boots and knees of the scrum and then celebrating mightily afterwards.

Indeed the uglier the player, the better he seemed to be. When I think back to the likes of Stack Stevens, Billy Beamont, Gordon Brown, Barry McGann and the physiognomical nightmare that was the Pontypool Front Row, none of them could be described as romantic heroes to fire a shrinking violet to a frenzy of sensual desire but they could play rugby and play it with a pace, a fire and a passion that seems to be absent these days.

Mills & Boon heroes tend to be solitary individuals, marked out from their peers by their superb looks and individuality. That is what makes them so attractive to women whereas the gentlemen listed above eschewed individual fame and glory and instead devoted themselves to the success of the team.

This team ethic meant that rugby in the seventies and eighties was almost entirely devoid of any female interest at all. Wives and girlfriends were banned from many club houses, and all away match coaches and rugby tours. Those that turned up to watch were usually relegated to standing disconsolately on the touchline in the freezing rain to be handed their man’s kit bag at the end of the game with the exhortation to have it washed for next week whilst he would head off to join the team in the bar. The team was the young man’s family and playing for it was a rite of passage. Eventually marriage, children and middle age meant the boots were hung up but until then, like the Spartan in the  Agoge, he had a close knit male environment in which to learn and develop.

Opportunities for that sort of sponsored masculine tutelage seems to have all but disappeared these days and more is the pity. Many mourn the lack of positive male role models and rugby used to provide them in fifteens. It taught discipline and deference. The referee was always addressed as ‘Sir’ even if he was blind and partial. Dress codes were strict: blazers and ties on the coach, socks suspended on the pitch, dinner jackets at the club dinner, your girl friend’s bra and panties in the conga line.

Whatever the violence on the field the opposition were always welcomed into the club house and bought a jug of beer and a plate of pie and beans and the crowds were always generous and good humoured. It was a great way to grow up and I very much regret that it has passed into history and that my son will never be able to experience it in the way that I did.

Reading the book will be no substitute at all.